52°North Student Innovation Prize

Home

About

Other Activities

Student Innovation Prize

Innovation in use -

Idea – concept – implementation – application

Innovation is a driving force for the development of our economy. Innovation is based on innovative ideas, on applicable and implementable concepts, on generating new technologies and applications. However, a novel idea becomes an innovation only if it meets certain demands and unfolds its use in practice. It must address a certain market niche, i.e. have market relevance, or help e.g. a particular organization to improve its business.

The 52°North Student Innovation Prize encourages students to contribute to innovation in the field of Geoinformatics. The prize acknowledges and financially rewards outstanding innovative and trendsetting concepts and announces them to a greater audience.

52°North invites all students of Geoinformatics and related fields, who have not yet completed a Master’s Degree or Diploma in either Geoinformatics, Informatics or a related field, to submit a paper outlining their innovative concept. In addition, the paper must emphasize the innovative quality of the concept and convincingly describe its feasibility and practical use.*

The innovation prize is sponsored by 52°North GmbH, con terra GmbH, ESRI Deutschland GmbH, the Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC) of the University of Twente and the Institute for Geoinformatics at the University of Muenster. These institutions work together under the banner of the 52°North Open Source Initiative to promote research and education in the field of Geoinformatics. A central part of 52°North’s activities is the constant exchange of research ideas and innovative developments between academia and business.

*Please note that guidelines and regulations are released on yearly basis.

2011 Student Innovation Prize

This year’s jury, comprised of nine representatives from science and the IT industry, awarded First Prize to Tobias Kohr of the University of Technology Dresden for his paper “Development of a service-based Geoportal enabling the Mapping of Whale Watching”. Marcell Roth from the Insitute for Geoinformatics at the University of Muenster received second prize for his paper “Geographic Feature Pipes”.

2010 Student Innovation Prize

In February 2010, Daniel Nüst, diploma student at the Institute for Geoinformatics (ifgi) at the University of Münster, was awarded first prize for his project “sos4R – Accessing a Sensor Observation Service from R“. He was joined by Alexander McKeown and James McHugh from the Commonwealth Scientific and Research Organization (CSIRO) ICT Centre in Tasmania, Australia, who also received first prize for their proposal “Developing an SOS Client for Use by the General Public”.

2009 Student Innovation Prize

In June 2008, 52°North opened the competition for the first 52°North Student Innovation Prize for Geoinformatics. Due to the number of applicants and the high quality of proposals, the jury awarded three prizes. First prize went to Thorsten Deelmann and Martin Wilden from the Institute for Geoinformatics in Muenster, Germany for their proposal "Prioritizing tasks for a Web Processing Service". Victor Gonzales Cortés from the Universidad Politécnica in Valencia, Spain received second prize for his proposal "SQL Script Profile for 52°North WPS-T". The special award for applied open source development was awarded to Amos Kabo-Bah and Yin Zun from the International Institute for GIS and Earth Observation (ITC) in Enschede, the Netherlands for their proposal "Developing a GUI for Modelling the Water Quality of the 52°North Dinkel River".